Orhan Pamuk: My first passport; What does it mean to belong to a country ?
Orhan Pamuk in The New Yorker (USA), April 16, 2007, Pg. 56 Vol. 83 No. 8
In 1959, when I was seven years old, my father went missing under mysterious circumstances; several weeks later, we received word that he was in Paris, living in a cheap hotel in Montparnasse. He was filling up the notebooks that he would later give to me, and from time to time, from the Café Dome, he’d spot Jean-Paul Sartre passing in the street. At first, my grandmother sent him money from Istanbul. My grandfather had made a fortune in railroads. Under my grandmother’s tearful gaze, my father and my uncles hadn’t yet managed to squander their entire inheritance-not all of the apartments had been sold. But, twenty-five years after her husband’s death, my grandmother decided that the money was running out and she stopped subsidizing her bohemian son in Paris.........
In the mean time, Orhan Pamuk becomes a juror in CANNES FILM FESTIVAL and in the Walrus magazine two of his books, Snow and Istanbul: Memories and the City are discussed in article entitled as Identity Crisis:"Turkey’s most famous writer evokes his country’s schizophrenic past and its struggle with Islam’s place in day-to-day life...."
